Final Exam

My personal vision for secondary schooling in the 21st century is for classrooms to be places where students think critically about the issues their community and world face, where students have a voice and share it willingly because they are heard, where students feel a real responsibility for helping their classmates be successful, where the teacher believes that all students want to and will succeed if their needs are met, where the teacher strives for equitable access to information for all of her students, and where exciting, cooperative, integrative, rich, and meaningful learning takes place each day. I envision classrooms being launching points for student exploration and for the learning process to be celebrated as much as the learning products. I picture students learning skills that will help them succeed in future careers. I imagine students as active learners, proud of their learning accomplishments.

One additional action I will implement next semester is to try to foster problem-solving and critical thinking in my students. I want to facilitate active participation and thinking in my students through the tasks I design. I want to try to move away from tutoring and more towards intentional planning that encourages students to think for themselves and help one another. Specifically, I will try to incorporate warm-up activities that have high cognitive demand and launch an idea to be explored in class. I will try to design these activities so that they require critical thinking to take place and give students chances to practice communicating their ideas orally to group members and in writing. I will try to provide my students with opportunities to reflect on their learning and questions through writing or sharing ideas with their classmates, especially after highly demanding problem-solving activities.

Two actions that I will try to implement during my first two years of my teaching career are to try to increasingly connect my content to real-world applications and skills students will need in the future as well as to teach and facilitate effective cooperative learning skills in my students during group work activities. I will ask myself each time I am planning for instruction of a new topic, how could I make this concept more interesting, relevant, and meaningful to my students. I will ask myself what skills students will need in the future that I could help them develop during my course. To facilitate cooperative learning, I will take time to establish group norms through cooperative learning activities, provide roles to group members, and attempt to maintain norms through continuous feedback and accountability structures for my students.

Once I have established myself as a professional and trusted member of my educational community, I would like to help make decisions within my department about what type of curriculum we will use and what specific learning objectives we have for students, including those in addition to our content learning goals. I would like to participate actively in department discussions and emphasize the importance of having access to curricular resources that support student learning via an inquiry method or discovery learning approaches. I would also like to encourage a department wide focus on teaching cooperative learning skills to students and emphasizing the relevance and real-world applications of the concepts we are teaching in our lessons. I want to build in as many ways as possible for students to develop skills that will prepare them to succeed in the future and in the workplace.

I think that my goal of fostering problem-solving, critical thinking, and reflection in my students next semester fits under the reform categories of powerful teaching and creating new curriculum paths. My goals of teaching students cooperative learning skills and making the content of my lessons relevant and applicable to real-world issues are also examples of powerful teaching. My future goal of participating in department wide decisions about curriculum and learning goals is an example of new professional roles and creating new curriculum paths.